historian said:
In modern society, "secularism" has become the equivalent of a religion, in its behavior and political actions. Secularists try to impose their views on government on society far more than Christians do. We only want our 1st amendment rights, they are intolerant of people who disagree with them and often target them, especially Christians.
Governments have always legislated based on moral views. Morality is the foundation of law. America is a western country firmly within the Judeo-Christian tradition. That is historic fact and reality despite Leftists trying to deny or erase it. To the extent that the moral foundation of laws have a religious element, then the laws will necessarily reflect that. It has worked reasonably well for 250 years and there is no good reason to replace that with a different foundation. In fact, we have many reasons to avoid such dangerous experimentation.
The personality cults and tyranny of the murderous dictatorships were based on their philosophies and explicit rejection or distortion of religion and morality. The atheism of those regimes went hand in hand with their philosophy. What did Marx say about religion? How much did they oppress people for their religious faith? The connection is very real and direct. Attempts to separate the are futile and dishonest. The state or dictator became the god to replace the suppression of the one True God. It's still happening in North Korea today explicitly.
The Christian tradition that predominates is that of Jesus Christ, not any specific denomination. Theological debates among he different groups are irrelevant to any discussion of public policy. Anyone who attempts to insert them into such debates are distorting the issues.
Any attempt to remove faith from public policy discussions, a common goal of secularists and atheists, leads to the kind of tyranny and oppression that resulted in tens of millions of innocent people murdered in the 20th century. Yes, it was all in the name of socialism but it was also perpetrated by tyrannical dictatorships that tried to replace God with the state/dictator. Hence the personality cults.
As John Adams and other Founding Fathers noted, our system of government is incompatible without religion and morality. As a Puritan, he was clearly thinking in the framework of Christianity.
"Secularism has become the equivalent of a religion" This is meaningless rhetoric. Secularism has no doctrine or creed, no deity, no theology, no worship. Secularism is a viewpoint you don't like. By your logic, if secularism is a religion, every political philosophy (libertarianism, conservatism) is a religion, which means the words lose their meaning, and you're simply using religion a nondescriptive slur.
"Secularists impose more than Christians" What is your metric for this claim? The Texas curriculum fights (and elsewhere) are cogent examples of religiously motivated policy imposed on non-believers. Give me a specific, comparable policy example.
"America is Judeo-Christian, historic fact" You're conflating cultural influence with the constitutional design of our founding fathers, and ignoring the very oppression from a religious state they were attempting to avoid and had escaped. Our founding fathers were culturally Christian, yet they wrote a godless Constitution. There is no mention of God, Jesus, or Christianity in the text itself. They explicitly barred religious tests for office and established a no religion amendment. If the founding fathers intended a Christian government, that was a strange way to write the founding document.
"Christian tradition of Jesus, not denomination, is what matters" You're just dodging my question. Christian tradition of Jesus has no meaning. Whose reading alledgedly of "what Jesus taught" should govern governmental policy - civil rights, health and welfare, national defense, or any other public interest? Catholics, Othodox Christians, Southern Baptists, and mainline Protestants disagree sharply on many issues using the same Jesus. "Just follow Christ, not denominations" is an empty non unifying statement. Actual denominational, Protestant, Catholic and Othodox disagreements are exactly at the level of interpretation you're trying to dismiss.
Marx/atheism-causes-tyranny.Correlating Marx's hostility to religion doesn't establish that atheism causes totalitarianism. The actual mechanism common to Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot was the suppression of any rival authority - religious, intellectual, familial - in favor of absolute state/personality loyalty. That's why Pol Pot targeted intellectuals and glasses-wearers as readily as monks. North Korea's state ideology, Juche, essentially functions as a state religion with a god-dictator, complete with quasi-theological doctrine. Juche is not "atheism replacing religion," it's one religion (state/dictator worship) replacing another.
John Adams quote "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people". You're ignoring the context of "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people," and ignoring that Adams also signed the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), ratified unanimously by the Senate, stating outright that "the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion." The founders were not univocal and cherry-picking one Adams quote while ignoring a treaty his own administration signed is the same selective-scripture problem you flagged with Talarico.
“It is impossible to get a man to understand something if his livelihood depends on him not understanding.” ~ Upton Sinclair
